Why Education is failing in Ontario

I was buying a book at my local Chapters/Indigo store the other day. If you are Canadian this may not seem like a surprise, but I notice they sell a lot of other things (now furniture), so I feel it may be necessary to be clear. At point of sale the clerk at the till asked me if I wanted to donate to their foundation supporting reading in schools.

This surprised me on a few levels, so I had to ask more questions, just to make sure Heather of Indigo was not spending it on male strippers, cocaine, or Oprah swill. The clerk kindly told me that the money goes to underprivileged schools  who need books. I then asked about where these schools are - is this local, provincial, or national? On this she was less clear but she did mention that some would go to local schools.

This shocked me.

This shocked me, not because Indigo is doing this, but because it told me how far we have descended into the abyss. I donated, because the cause appears, at least on face value, to be a noble cause. But I have thought a lot about this, and I have tried to collect them here:

1. This is a smart move on Indigo's part. Not just because it makes them appear to have a social conscience, but because they benefit from a considered, intelligent, and thought provoked community that buys the books (and the furniture and the tack) that they sell. If our community was populated by a collection of drooling imbeciles (I am trying hard not to make a reference to conservative MPs here) then they would be selling bingo cards, velvet Stephen Harper prints, and guns.

2. Why are the schools in this situation in the first place? Does not our taxes pay for adequate funding of schools? Why would one school be better off than another? Does not the government have enough money? Where is this money going?

3. If the government does not have enough money, where is revenue failing?

And there we have the crux of the problem. We know that the government of Ontario, with its cash cow the OLG, are trying desperately to tax the stupid through lotteries and casinos. But this is still failing to fund health care and education. But why do they need to do this?

4. They need to do this because they have made large tax concessions to corporations. The governments do not want to do this, they have to, because the more greedy of the corporations decide to offshore if they do not get the corporate tax discounts from governments they want. And in some cases (Catepillar) they take the tax breaks and then move shop anyways. In some cases, the elected representatives are really only representatives of corporations but  I will leave that as an exercise to the student.

So the corporations take the money, we loose our health care, and our education.

But we loose much much more. We loose independent education and critical thinking, because Corporations then step in to a) look good, to appear to have a social conscience and b) can then fill the education role by molding young minds to whatever opinion the corporations wish.